This is the third part of my review of Robert Bauval’s and Thomas Brophy’s 2011 book Black Genesis, about the “black” origins of Egyptian civilization. In this installment, the race-based zaniness truly begins. When last we left our erstwhile heroes, they were about to tell us how Nabta Playa was somehow both inaccurate in its solar alignments but somehow so astonishingly precise in its stellar alignments as to prove it encoded information about a pre-Ice Age world. At first, all seems well: They note that the upright stones at the center of Nabta Playa align with Orion in 4920 BCE, about the time of the site’s construction. But then they decide, without any solid evidence, that a second set of stones within the circle must also align with Orion—but that they only fit in 16,500 BCE, and then only with the shoulders or Orion, not the belt. Yes, the authors choose to see Nabta Playa as yet another “image of Orion” on the ground, but even their own charts show that the correlation is incredibly imprecise, not as they say “elegant and profound.” Oh, and it also occurs at sunset on the summer solstice, which is not, so far as I know, of any relationship to the spring equinox sunrises that Bauval was so enamored of in The Orion Mystery and Mystery of the Sphinx (Keeper of Genesis). Therefore, the connection he and Brophy imply escapes me. Later, the authors concede that the site’s stones may have multiple meanings, though they seem to have unique insight into the “best” one.

This chart from "Black Genesis" shows how the authors' envision the site "aligning" to Orion in 16,500 BCE. Note that the correlation is far from precise.

Your enjoyment of the rest of this book depends entirely upon how badly you want to believe that there is any evidence that three stones, whose exact position is somewhat hypothetical based on a reconstruction of the site, are perfectly aligned to an event 12,000 years before its construction—and not for any other purpose. Your enjoyment will also be affected by how much you enjoy hearing the two authors speak collectively as “we” even when referring to just one, such as when “we” earned a PhD in astrophysics. The rest of their arguments about alignments concern their attempt to prove that various other megaliths at the site targeted Sirius and other stars in 6100 BCE instead of 4500 BCE. Frankly, it’s more or less irrelevant to the idea of a “Black” origin for Egypt, so I’m fine either way. However, the authors need a date around 6100 BCE so they can relate it to Egypt in a ridiculously convoluted way that I’m not sure I have space to explain. The short form is that they want to prove Nabta Playa in 6100 BCE marked Sirius and Alkaid (in the Big Dipper), then marked Sirius and Dubhe between 4500 and 3000 BCE so that they can claim (seriously) that the appearance of Alkaid in images of the Pharaoh Djoser (c. 2670 BCE) was “monumentalizing the time when his distant ancestors at Nabta Playa around 6100 BCE initiated the ritual of using the Bull’s Thigh constellation to track the rising of Sirius with Alkaid.” In short, if two stars are marked in the archaeology of two places, the authors believe they must be connected even though no direct evidence links them. What then should we make of the fact that in Apollonius’ Argonautica (3.957) the hero Jason is said to be the star Sirius? Is this proof of Nabta Playa’s influence there, too? Or, like Robert Temple, are we to take this all as information from the Fish Men of Sirius? There are some interesting ideas about alignments and their relationship to rituals, but the authors provide no proof that later Egyptian Orion-Sirius rituals are related to hypothetical ones as Nabta Playa. Worse, they are focused single-mindedly on the site to the point that they offer not a thought about whether other Neolithic cultures contributed to the Egyptian rituals they want to make descend (millennia later) directly from Nabta Playa. Upper and Lower Egypt both had their own Neolithic cultures, and surely they contributed something to the proto-dynastic period. The authors engage in some more sleight of hand when they try to relate the ritual burial of cows at Nabta Playa to the “empty” sarcophagi of the Giza Pyramids:

…we may wonder if the empty tombs and cow-bone burials are part of some mysterious star ritual related to some ancestral cult of rebirth. This provocative thought occurs because, as we will see in chapter 6, the same empty tombs have baffled Egyptologists when the Old Kingdom pyramids were explored and found to contain no human remains.

The “empty tombs” at Nabta Playa are known archaeologically as “complex structures,” but there is no firm evidence they were meant as tombs, symbolically or otherwise. Similarly, while Old Kingdom pyramids are today empty, there is no way to say they were always empty. The Arabs, for example, reported a tradition that when Al-Ma’mun opened the Great Pyramid his men found within “a large room filled with dead bodies, each of which was wrapped in a shroud longer than one hundred dresses sewn end to end. Time has altered these bodies, and they have become black; these bodies, which are not larger than ours, have lost nothing of their tissue or their hair.” These are obviously mummies. If the authors believe the Qur’an holds memories of Nabta Playa 5,000 years after the fact, why should we doubt Al-Maqrizi’s reports of Al-Ma’mun’s activities a mere 500 years later, copying from an earlier source? The authors further state that “some of the great pyramids of Giza” contained “the bones of cows,” though I am not aware of this fact. The only cow bones I know of are the food remains from the workers’ village, and my reference books on Egypt don’t mention cow bones inside the Giza pyramids. Chapter 4 finishes with a brief account of Bangold’s Circle, another stone circle in the Libyan Desert and probably dating to the Neolithic. Although the authors fail to mention it, the fact that this circle exists and may well be separate culturally from the Nabta Playa one argues against the thesis that Nabta Playa was the sole conduit for ancient “Black” wisdom. Chapter 5 tries to find out where “Black” people came from. Now we start getting into the crazy. The authors start by suggesting that Egyptology “frequently” identifies ancient Egyptians as Black “Hamites”—which I don’t think has actually been the case for most of the past century. Do you believe that the word Hamites has “often been adopted by scholars, particularly Egyptologists and anthropologists,” to describe Egyptians? Even Afrocentrist writers concede that the word “Hamite” was obsolete decades before the 1980s Afrocentrist effort to revive it as a term of racial pride; in 1966 Wyatt McGaffey wrote that “Hamite” had become obsolete “recently,” which I guess puts a date of around 1960 on the end of that usage—fully in keeping with alternative history’s insistence that everything published between 1890 and 1960 is unchanging dogma ruthlessly defended by close-minded elites. What is one to make of discussions of the “race” of the Egyptians in terms of a “Negroid-Hamitic race of black-skinned people with fine Caucasian-like features,” even when attributed to Victorian science? The authors ask us to accept that the ancient Egyptians were “Black Africans” and that to do otherwise is “racist” and “Eurocentric.” The authors, though, treat all “Black” people as though they were one and the same—as though the Nubians, West Africans, and Southern Africans were identical, despite the obvious range of physical traits displayed among them. Modern scientific studies suggest that ancient Egyptians were related to East African and Nubian populations. Bauval and Brophy want us to view this academic consensus about the ultimate origins of the Egyptians as both shocking and as a thesis the authors are uniquely advocating against a racist academic mainstream. While the authors are correct that historically Egyptologists have been loath to ascribe an African (rather than Mediterranean or Levantine) origin for Egypt, today that is not the case so far as the mainstream consensus is concerned (as always individual scholars’ views vary). At any rate, though, Egypt was peopled thousands of years before Nabta Playa, which means that the ultimate ancestors of the Egyptians had been in place for millennia and were for all intents and purposes indigenous by the time Egyptian culture arose. Given that the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans placed no particular value on lighter or darker shades of brown skin, I don’t see what the purpose is of trying to force the Egyptians into a modern box of “Black” (or “White”), which is entirely a European classification system imposed on a rainbow of skin colors that only roughly align with morphology (e.g., people in India have dark brown skin yet are classified as Caucasian). The authors, citing examples from Henri Frankfort’s Kingship and the Gods from 1948 (!), write that “jargon is unfortunately still used to avoid directly stating that there is a Black African origin of the pharaohs’ culture and race.” Still? 1948?! (Frankfort actually advocated for an African origin for ancient Egypt, along with E. A. Wallis Budge.) “Black” is a socially constructed a category, and Herni Frankfort wrote before most readers were even born! Afrocentrists have the same problem: West Africans and Nubians present very different physical traits, and yet we are to accept all these people as identical because of their skin color, to the exclusion of all their other cultural traits! The authors then go back to the 1920s and 1820s to give more examples of race denial, supposedly still defended by the academy, leading to a discussion of Black Athena and how it led to an “uneasy feeling” among Egyptologists that they were wrong on the blackness of Egyptians’ skins—and their own racist souls. If the authors can afford to fly to Egypt and traipse around the desert, surely they can afford a trip to their nearest library to check out JSTOR. Things have changed since 1960, though alternative historians don’t seem to understand that. In discussing Afrocentrism, the authors get into queasy territory when they praise Clarence Walker for denying that “his own Blackness should affect his scholastic conclusions,” all while criticizing him for denying the primacy of Egypt in Black history. The authors reaffirm that the Egyptians were “Black Africans” (whatever that is to mean—skin color über alles) and that Afrocentrism, in general terms—though not in its extremes—is “accurate” because that newfangled “evolution” thing suggests all humans originated in Africa, so “the world was created by Black people”—as though modern African populations were not equally the descendants of the first humans (“Black stock” they call them) as every other population. For the authors, evolution seems to be something that happened only to other races, who became melanin deficient. I should stop here and point out that the timelines are all askew. Every human, the authors tell us, can trace his origins to Africa, but the Egyptians, tracing their origins to sub-Saharan Africa within 5,000 years or so of dynastic Egypt could do so faster and therefore are “blacker” because somehow evolution only applies to White people, who are melanin-deficient Blacks. Does that make Native Americans “really” Asians because their ancestors came from Siberia sometime (depending on which group) between 1,000 and 15,000 years ago? I guess I am just not getting the point. Here I’d like to present this line from the authors, citing an Afrocentrist scholar (who, unchallenged by our authors, claims on the basis of melanin levels that the Dravidians of India are African—against all evidence), about academia’s refusal to assign Blackness to the Egyptians: “Thus generations of readers have been misled to the false belief that the ancient Egyptian civilization owes little or nothing to Africa.” Culture is not biological, and the racial origins of a people 5,000 years before implies nothing about their later culture. For example, Americans are overwhelmingly Christian, a religion that sprouted among Semitic people and Mediterranean Greeks, and yet somehow shockingly Americans are overwhelmingly neither Semitic nor Greek by demographics. Culture is not biological. I am ethnically Italian and Polish, but aside from pasta I owe virtually nothing to either culture since I am (surprise!) American and speak English, from which sources come my cultural inheritance. Several pages of personal attacks on Zahi Hawass and his alleged anti-Semitism follow by way of implying that modern Egyptians see any attempt to link Egypt to “Black Africa” as a Zionist conspiracy, and then the authors complain that one of Brophy’s articles on astronomy at Nabta Playa was rejected by an academic journal with a comment that he and his coauthor were “acting like arrogant Westerners,” but without the name of the journal there really isn’t any way to evaluate this. It’s just more anti-academic conspiracy-mongering. The authors conclude that Nabta Playa is a “threat” to mainstream academia because it might unleash Black power. But where are the aliens? Brophy advocated for aliens in his first book, and now suddenly they’re all gone and replaced with conspiracies about Egypt and Israel struggling for control over Egyptian history. An endless section on Saharan rock art follows, which would have been interesting on its own but has very little to do with what came before. The authors conclude that some images on the rock art at the Cave of Swimmers (with shamanic imagery) in the Libyan Desert near the Libyan border could be precursors to elements of Egyptian mythology. It’s possible, but not yet provable; but even so, the Greeks had elements in their mythology from Babylon, but that does not “make” them Babylonian. More evidence is needed to connect the desert site to the pharaohs. Again, though, the timeline issue bothers me. We have thousands of unaccounted for years and the authors’ own acknowledgement that many other factors contributed to the development of Egypt. So, if an indigenous people (originally from East Africa) were already in Egypt thousands of years before Nabta Playa, how does that make the Nabta Playa people the origins of Egypt? If everyone on earth is “really” African, how does one distinguish degrees of “Blackness” except by racist criteria of what it means to be “truly” (stereotypically) Black? The authors are very interested in deep skin color, wide noses, thick lips, and “kinky” hair, but these are traits of equatorial West Africa, not East Africa, where tall people with thin noses and lips are more frequently encountered. Next time: I’ll finish up this weird book by reviewing the authors’ final evidence for how “Black” Africans birthed ancient Egypt: Mythology!

Considering what is going on actually, I was expecting an outburst of decency & "urgency" from so called "skeptics & critical thinkers".I took a look around blogs & sites,desperately seeking to find something,someone breaking up from intellectual lethargy,I found nothing.

I have to confess I am disappointed but not surprised,probably because I already know the casual answer that skeptics cherish to provide: "we do not deal with politics".

Sharon Hill`Doubtful News front-page is devoted to "Scottish monsters,Metallic sounds in BC town freak people out,Bigfoot",Jason focuses on "black origins of Egyptian civilization",the self righteous nitwits from the James Randi Educational Foundation are agonizing on "Miracle of the Shroud II: The Second Coming".
There is a cognitive dissonance affecting skeptics & debunkers.When it comes to rage intellectual wars & crusades against loonies who infect us with their nonsensical bullshit,skeptics & debunkers are always on the front-line,but when you expect them to use the same energy to tackle issues which have tremendous impact on societies & our daily lives,there is no one to be found.Skeptics have "priorities" & a selective way of expressing their indignation.

Pseudo science & alternative history deeply affect public perception,the educational system,the very fabric of society, but they are not responsible for acts of wars which will eventually bring death & destruction on a Gargantuan scale.Because somehow unconscionably you believe (& you wont admit it) that the blood of Syrians or any other Middle Easterners, is less valuable than the blood of "Westerners".

Skeptics,rational & critical thinkers,I`ll leave you with some home work. What about (for once) using the same motivation,critical approach & efficiency to deconstruct the lies that are being fed to you by the very institutions that are supposed to represent you?.

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Mike

8/31/2013 11:31:49 am

This site (and the ones you mention) simply isn't about politics, and it clearly says so. Expecting Jason to suddenly change topics and post an article about the current affairs in Syria would just be jarring and weird. It's like getting angry at the AV Club because they don't feature articles about the state of the economy. Besides, isn't PolitiFact (http://www.politifact.com/) devoted to determining the truth value of statements made by pundits and politicians? Seems written by skeptics to me.

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Thane

8/31/2013 02:44:28 pm

Tara, you seem to have a lot of rage and unresolved anger. You should probably do something about that.

I normally wouldn't comment on a post like yours for a variety or reasons but in this case, I believe your comments are out of line considering to what this site is dedicated to and that you are lashing out at people without warrant.

You do not know what Jason or anyone else on the Internet may think, believe, or do beyond what they tell you about on whatever sites they post. Heck, you don't even know if they are honestly posting what they think and believe as the 'Net is rife with people who find it amusing or have a pathological need to pretend to be things they are not.

As Mike points out, this site isn't about anything but Jason's critiques of Alternate history, related conspiracies, and bizarro theories based on poor scholarship or misreadings of texts and the over-proliferation of the poor scholarship and the theories born of them.

In my humble opinion, too much of made of Western or Anglo-centric viewpoints and allege racism some read into it because,. let's face it, the subjects are from Western countries and who have a egocentric need to view the world from their rigid frames of reference. If were in China or in other areas of the world, I very much suspect you would find the local strain of the same phenomenon because it is a human condition. That's my opinion.

As to the Syrian situation, it is terrible...but it's been terrible what they Syrians have been doing to each other for centuries (yes, I know the nation-state of Syria is a relative;y recent construct and that the area is full of different tribes and that land has changed hands many times over the centuries with a myriad of different rulers) It seems Assad has gassed his people at least 12 times before this latest attack and yet, where was the outrage? Where was yours? What about the 100,000 killed conventionally? What about the slaughters in Egypt and the unwarranted targeting of Coptic Christians and the destruction of communities and churches that existed long before Islam was a twinkle in Muhammad's eyes? how about the ongoing hostilities in nearly every other part of the world? How about the displaced boat people of southern China who are still treated as less than 2nd class citizens? What about Nepal? Or the gang-raps in India? etc etc etc.

What makes Syria so special and why now?

Either the West is Evil and should leave "The World" alone or "The West" is the only hope to stop the barbarism and violence in "The World". You can't have it both ways.

Sadly, there is always trouble when humans are involved and there isn't enough time, resources, wealth, and reasonable people to deal with for it all to end and never reoccur. Color me jaded.

I am not going to get into it with you as I sense from your postings that it would be a pointless endeavor.

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Dave Lewis

8/31/2013 04:52:39 pm

Tara, I'm very sorry you are so agitated. I hope you fell better soon!

Dave Lewis

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Paul

9/1/2013 12:52:45 am

If you see a void, fill it. Create your blog.

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Shane Sullivan

8/31/2013 03:14:17 pm

Interestingly, by insisting so desperately that ancient Egyptians be classified as "black," and by marking Egypt as Black Africa's most important accomplishment, the authors actually diminish the worth of this imagined pan-African ethnic group. As though, if we don't give "them" Egypt, they haven't contributed anything to humanity.

It's not enough that the aforementioned imaginary ethnic group (consisting of every dark-skinned person ever born in Africa) would have spawned the ENTIRE HUMAN RACE.

It tells us quite a bit about the authors.

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The Other J.

9/5/2013 08:03:53 pm

That's a really sharp way to put it -- sharp/incisive, and sharp/biting. I like it.

Jason's point that the "Nabta Playa is a 'threat' to mainstream academia because it might unleash Black power" is interesting, and seems to point to something else. Whether it's this book, arguments for a Templar or Scottish or Viking claim to the United States, or a number of other alternative histories I won't bother listing here, or even old people complaining about what it was like "In my day," there's a sense that recovering some lost history will somehow unleash some undefined power.

What is that? Something about it seems very conservative -- in the classically social sense, not the political sense, and not in the contemporary social sense it's generally used today to refer to civil rights and private enterprise. I mean that more classically socially conservative mode, where there's a constant move to try to get back to or recover some lost history that really only exists in nostalgia, and not in reality. I don't know if I'm explaining it well, but it seems like there's a common motivator behind classic social conservativism and some of these alternative histories -- even when they're fooling themselves that they're being progressive and radical my making ancient Egypt black.

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Americanegro

8/21/2016 12:49:19 am

To be fair, it seems that the ancestors of successful people got the heck out of Africa ASAP, and today's sub-Saharan Africans have some sort of Planet of the Apes situation going on.

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tubby

9/1/2013 11:07:02 am

Do they ever discuss Egypt's art? They were pretty prolific, and I thought that most Egyptologists considered the skin tone shown in their art represented common skin tones in the population. I thought that the medium red-brown skin tone shown in their art wasn't an uncommon tone for people living in North Africa today. Are those people considered Black Africans by the authors? Or do they suggest that the ancient Egyptians simply painted themselves as lighter due to art convention?

When discussing art, they emphasize stereotypically "Black" features in some images, particularly those believed to depict sub-Saharan Africans. However, they prefer to rely on Greek testimony that the Egyptians' skins were "black" (a problematic term in Greek, which did not always mean what the authors want it to--it could refer to anything darker than light olive) to "prove" they were "always" considered "Black" Africans.

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BP

9/3/2013 08:31:49 am

If you closely look at egyptian art you will notice (with some exceptions) that peasant/felahin are shown with darker skin (interestingly they use shades of red a lot) elits/gods are shown with lighter skin. Probably more a reflection of the old darker skin emplies manual labor, lighter skin means you can afford to stay out of the sun, but who knows for sure.
Also to remark on this from Jason "Several pages of personal attacks on Zahi Hawass and his alleged anti-Semitism follow by way of implying that modern Egyptians see any attempt to link Egypt to “Black Africa” as a Zionist conspiracy," I am reminded of when the TV movie on Sadat came out there was a lot of outrage in Egypt. American tv thought it was because Louis Gosset Jr. was cast. When asked the Egyptians pointed out that they had no problem with a black man cast as Sadat, they were mad because of how he was portrayed.

Color was also used to denote gender. Men are usually depicted in red tones, while women are depicted in pale yellow tones. These are generalized memes and not an ironclad rule, so there are exceptions.

Americanegro

8/21/2016 12:53:40 am

"Paul N. - ->Color was also used to denote gender. Men are usually depicted in red tones, while women are depicted in pale yellow tones. These are generalized memes and not an ironclad rule, so there are exceptions."

That's nonsense, because bewbs.

Inigo

11/16/2015 03:05:28 pm

Black people have less of a reason to reconstruct a glorious ancient history than do northern Europeans! Not a single statue or anything of the sort to suggest collected thought. The Sphinx, the Olmec heads, amongst many other ancients artifacts, are undeniably black, negroid, Africoid. The isn't a single northern European (blond, red haired, freckled faced etc) equivalent of the Sphinx, Olmec heads. Nothing!! So shameful is northern Europe's no history status that even Adolf Hitler, the white supremacy advocate, claimed brown skin Indians as his own and adopted their swastika, he tried his best to reclassify mulatto Greeks and Romans as white, blond haired Europeans; shameful, it's embarrassing! Not even Napoleon wasted a breath by sailing to northern Europe in search of a glorious history; he instead sailed half way across the world to have his portrait next to the majestic Africoid Sphinx! Shameful! It's beyond embarrassment! Worst of all the logic age is waning and a creative age is on the horizon! Oh oh! Here come the blacks once again!!

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About Me

I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.